The National Union of Metalworkers of SA (Numsa) recently held a spectacularly successful pre-launch conference for its new workers' party in Boksburg. The event was all over the news cycle and it was clear that the party, known as the Socialist Revolutionary Workers Party (SRWP), is now in business.
Numsa has its roots in the workerist politics of the radical wing of the union movement in the 1970s and '80s. It has been a strong critic of the bourgeois nationalism of the ANC and was eventually expelled from union federation Cosatu in 2014 after being strongly critical of former president Jacob Zuma. For some time, plans to form a workers' party, adopted at a congress in 2013, seemed stillborn.
The formation of the United Front in 2013 with the aim of uniting workplace and community struggles was not a success. The union inexplicably allowed NGOs and tiny sectarian organisations to capture the project and it went nowhere fast.
The formation of the South African Federation of Trade Unions (Saftu) in 2017 must have taken a large proportion of the union's available resources and energies and some concluded that the new party wasn't really going to happen. When it became understood in left-wing circles that Saftu general secretary Zwelinzima Vavi had plans for his own party linked to a group of NGOs and a small Trotskyist group, optimism declined further.
But last weekend it became clear that the workers' party is really happening, that it will be a real force and that, though Vavi may not support it, the rest of the Saftu leadership certainly does. Vavi suddenly seems isolated and out of touch. The centre of gravity has shifted to Numsa general secretary Irvin Jim.
For those who follow the Left closely, this is a thrilling moment. As I have noted in this publication before, the SACP lost its claim to being a party of the Left when it threw in its lot with Zuma.
The EFF does sometimes use left-wing slogans and imagery but it comes out of the authoritarian and often corrupt radical nationalist wing of the ANC, associated with people like the late Peter Mokaba and not the ANC's left wing.
Many credible left-wing intellectuals have seen the EFF as authoritarian populists whose nationalist politics is somewhere between proto-fascist and fascist.
Its recent collapse into crude dishonesty and thuggery in its support for Zuma's corrupt networks destroyed whatever credibility it ever enjoyed on the Left. Early signs are that its pro-corruption stance, and degeneration into crude Trump-like insults and dishonesty, will hit it hard at the polls, too.
All this means that the road is open for Numsa to capture the left space with its new party. It has a charismatic leader in Jim, an impressive organisational infrastructure, an equally impressive international network and a dues-paying base of 400,000 workers. There has never been a better foundation for anyone to start a new party in post-apartheid SA.
Of course there are challenges. An obvious question is what will happen to Numsa when, as seems likely, Jim becomes the leader of the new party. Given the failure of the United Front, another obvious question is whether or not the trade unionists in Numsa will be able to win the support of those involved in community struggles, including organised social movements and the unemployed.
As we saw with Occupy in the US, and are seeing with the Yellow Vests in France at the moment, new opposition to neoliberal capitalism often takes the form of horizontally organised and radically democratic politics. Suspicion of the political class runs so deep that any sense that new forms of politics will mirror the political establishment is quickly rejected.
The EFF with its big man, post-truth politics fits in well with the new forms of right-wing politics across the globe.
It is possible that the younger part of the electorate may shrug off the new workers' party as just another party. It is far too early to have a realistic sense of how the SRWP will do in the elections. Although it has a well-oiled union machine, it won't have much time to build its political machinery among the unemployed and in communities.
But when the votes are eventually counted, having an explicitly left-wing party in the fray will shift the political discourse.
I remarked recently that our politics had become a strange affair, with neoliberals in the DA and the ANC, and corrupt nationalists in the EFF and the ANC. Logically, the ANC should split into two camps, one aligned with the DA and the other with EFF. But in reality, this is unlikely to happen for as long as the ANC is the route into office and all that comes with that.
So the emergence of the workers' party means that, along with the neoliberalism and corrupt nationalism of the established parties, we will now have a left-wing voice. That is an important step forward towards the normalisation of our politics, and towards offering real choices to the electorate.
• Buccus is senior research associate at the Auwal Socio-Economic Research Institute, a research fellow in the School of Social Sciences at the University of KwaZulu-Natal and academic director of a university study-abroad programme on political transformation..